Having described the US as "worse than Japan in the 90s" during his last appearance [5], ECRI's Lakshman Achuthan remains adamant that (despite Bloomberg TV anchors' insistence that stocks are at all-time highs must mean something) the US has been in recession since last year and remains so. His comments that "you wouldn't have four years of zero-interest rate policy and quantitative easing if everything was okay," are as cogent now as then as he critically explains, as we have noted here [6] and here [7], that the attention being paid to 'soft data' surveys (such as ISM) is entirely mistaken since ISM/PMIs are now negatively correlated to actual production. The data (hard data doesn't lie [8]) in hand, he notes, suggest downward revisions and well within the range of a mild recession and "the market is disconnected."
1:00 ISM/PMI Debunking
1:50 How disconnected the markets are
2:20 The Secular challenge